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  • IMPORTANT ▶▶▶
  • M.O. & Worldlines In(3)
  • The Network Originated in Brazil
  • El Aleph
  • If You Can't Stand the Heat
  • From Harlem to Bahia

IMPORTANT ▶▶▶

M.O. & Worldlines In


Imagine the world's creative economy at your fingertips. Imagine 10 doors side-by-side. Beyond each, 10 more, each opening to a "creative" somewhere around the world. After passing through 8 such doorways you will have followed 1 pathway out of 100 million possible (2 sets of doorways yield 10 x 10 = 100 pathways). This is a simplified version of the metamathematics that makes it possible to reach everybody in the global creative economy in just a few steps It doesn't mean that everybody will be reached by everybody. It does mean that everybody can  be reached by everybody.


Appear below by recommending Case Watkins:

  • 2 James Madison University Faculty
  • 2 Cultural-Environmental Geographer
  • 2 Writer

The Network Originated in Brazil

 

Have you, dear friend, ever noticed how different places scattered across the face of the globe seem almost to exist in different universes? As if they were permeated throughout with something akin to 19th century luminiferous aether, unique, determined by that place's history? It's like a trick of the mind's light (I suppose), but standing on beach or escarpment in Salvador and looking out across the Baía de Todos os Santos to the great Recôncavo, and mindful of what happened there, one must be led to the inevitable conclusion that one is in a place unique to history, and to the present*.

 

"Chegou a hora dessa gente bronzeada mostrar seu valor / The time has come for these bronzed people to show their value..."Música: Assis Valente of Santo Amaro, Bahia. Vídeo: Betão Aguiar.

 

*More enslaved human beings entered the Bay of All Saints and the Recôncavo than any other final port-of-call throughout all of mankind's history.

 

These people and their descendants created some of the most uplifting music ever made, the foundation of Brazil's national art. We wanted their music to be accessible to the world (it's not even accessible here in Brazil) so we created a platform by which everybody's creativity is mutually accessible, including theirs.

 

El Aleph

 

This project began in an obscure record shop (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found it) in a shimmering Brazilian port city.

 

It was inspired in (the kabbalah-inspired fiction of) Borges' (short story) El Aleph, that in the pillar in Cairo's Mosque of Amr, where the universe in its entirety throughout all time is perceivable as an infinite hum from deep within the stone...

 

It "works" by virtue of the "small-world" phenomenon...the same responsible for the fact that most of us 7 billion or so beings are within 6 or fewer degrees of each other.

 

It was described (to some degree) and can be accessed via this article in British journal The Guardian (which named our radio of matrixed artists as one of ten best in the world):

 

www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/17/10-best-music-radio-station-around-world

 

With David Dye for U.S. National Public Radio: www.npr.org/2013/07/16/202634814/roots-of-samba-exploring-historic-pelourinho-in-salvador-brazil

 

All is more connected than we know.

 

Per the "spirit" above, our logo is a cortador de cana, a cane-cutter. It was designed by Walter Mariano, professor of design at the Federal University of Bahia to reflect the origins of the music the shop specialized in. The Brazilian "aleph" doesn't hum... it dances and sings.

 

If You Can't Stand the Heat

 

Image above is from the base of the cross in front of the church of São Francisco do Paraguaçu in the Bahian Recôncavo

 

Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word, limned in cadenced song, Brazil is a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony...

 

This is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin. It was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people). Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David. Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof. Nowhere else but here.

 

Oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption — elements of these are still strongly entrenched — have defined, delineated, and limited Brazil.

 

But strictured & bound as it has been and is, Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of — or perhaps because of — the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.

 

For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...

 

Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.

 

"Onde tem miséria, tem música!"* - Raymundo Sodré

 

And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.

 

Welcome to the kitchen!

 

* "Where there is misery, there is music!" Remarked during a conversation arcing from Bahia to Haiti and Cuba to New Orleans and the south side of Chicago and Harlem to the villages of Ireland and the gypsy camps and shtetls of Eastern Europe...

 

From Harlem to Bahia



  • Case Watkins
    I RECOMMEND

CURATION

  • from this node by: Criador acima/Creator above

This is the Universe of

  • Name: Case Watkins
  • City/Place: Shenandoah Valley / Dendê Coast
  • Country: United States

Current News

  • What's Up? Living, working, teaching, and writing between the Shenandoah Valley and the Dendê Coast.

Life & Work

  • Bio: Case Watkins is a geographer working at the intersections of power, environment, and justice. Dr. Watkins studies social-ecological interactions through time and across space—from the early colonial period to the present, and from agrarian landscapes in Latin America and the US South to the broader networks of the Atlantic World. He serves as an assistant professor of Justice Studies at James Madison University.

    Published in 2021, his book Palm Oil Diaspora reconstructs the environmental histories and political ecologies of palm oil landscapes, foodways, and economies in Brazil and the South Atlantic. Blending ethnographic, archival, and geospatial analyses, the book reinterprets transatlantic flows of power and resistance to reveal a complex African diaspora of people, plants, and knowledge.

    Drawing on fieldwork, archives, and digital mapping, his previous work has examined landscapes of race, class, and disaster; transnational migration, identity, and citizenship; agrarian, development, and environmental politics; and political ecologies of foodways, race, and agroecological change.

Contact Information

  • Email: casewatkins [at] gmail.com

Media | Markets

  • ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/latin-american-history/palm-oil-diaspora-afro-brazilian-landscapes-and-economies-bahias-dende-coast
  • ▶ Twitter: casewatkinsgeog
  • ▶ Website: http://casewatkins.wordpress.com
  • ▶ Website 2: http://dendezeirodabahia.wordpress.com
  • ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/casewatkins

My Writing

  • Publications: Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia's Dendê Coast

    Published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.
    http://bit.ly/podlivro

    Behind the social and environmental destruction of modern palm oil production lies a long and complex history of landscapes, cultures, and economies linking Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic World. Case Watkins traces palm oil from its prehistoric emergence in western Africa to biodiverse groves and cultures in Northeast Brazil, and finally the plantation monocultures plundering contemporary rainforest communities. Drawing on ethnography, landscape interpretation, archives, travelers’ accounts, and geospatial analysis, Watkins examines human-environmental relations too often overlooked in histories and geographies of the African diaspora, and uncovers a range of formative contributions of people and ecologies of African descent to the societies and environments of the (post)colonial Americas. Bridging literatures on Black geographies, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, political ecology, and decolonial theory and praxis, this study connects diverse concepts and disciplines to analyze and appreciate the power, complexity, and potentials of Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian palm oil economy.

Clips (more may be added)

  • 0:26
    Praia Imbassaí: From the Ocean to the River
    By Case Watkins
    32 views
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 'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother"
We're real mothers for ya!

 

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